The River Ister symbolizes the boundary between phases of life and understanding, which one must pass through to achieve personal transformation. Ovid dreams that the gods meet him on the river, signifying his potential to enter into a new phase of life and undergo a personal transformation that will radically alter his perspective. Although Ovid does not cross the river in the dream, when he and the Child must flee Tomis for their lives, Ovid instinctively heads for the river, which he has always felt is the “final boundary of [his] life, waiting to be crossed” before his final transformation can take place. Ovid and the Child cross the frozen river in the dark, and when they are midway across, can see neither the shore they left from or the shore they are going to. The river feels as if it could be endless, symbolizing the way that their transition, and the suffering it involves, briefly feels as if it will never end. However, when Ovid and the Child reach the other side and cross into the northern lands, they enter a new world and state of being. Ovid finally grasps the true language of the universe for the first time and internalizes the new perspective it offers. As Ovid and the Child travel onward, Ovid stops counting the days or thinking about where they will go, since the “river is far behind them,” signifying that they have made their choice and crossed into their new lives—there is no going back.
The River Ister Quotes in An Imaginary Life
I stood silent in the center of the plain and [the horsemen] began to wheel in great circles about me, uttering cries—not of malice I thought, but of mourning. Let us into your world, they seemed to be saying. Let us cross into your empire. Let us into your lives. Believe in us. Believe.
Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back—not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves.
What else should life be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful setting out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become […] What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?
The days pass, and I cease to count them. The river is far behind us. […] I no longer ask myself what we are making for. The notion of a destination no longer seems necessary to me. It has been swallowed up in the immensity of this landscape, as the days have been swallowed up by the sense I now have of a life that stretches beyond measurable time.
The River Ister Symbol Timeline in An Imaginary Life
